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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Overflowing Crater Lakes Carved Canyons across Mars

    November 19, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Jezero crater is a paleolake and potential landing site for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission to look for past life. The outlet canyon carved by overflow flooding is visible in the upper right side of the crater. Ancient rivers carved the inlets on the right side of the crater.
    Credit: NASA/Tim Goudge

    Today, most of the water on Mars is locked away in frozen ice caps. But billions of years ago it flowed freely across the surface, forming rushing rivers that emptied into craters, forming lakes and seas. New research led by The University of Texas at Austin has found evidence that sometimes the lakes would take on so much water that they overflowed and burst from the sides of their basins, creating catastrophic floods that carved canyons very rapidly, perhaps in a matter of weeks.

    The findings...

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    Astronomers find possible Elusive Star behind Supernova

    November 18, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This is an artist's concept of a blue supergiant star that once existed inside a cluster of young stars in the spiral galaxy NGC 3938, located 65 million light-years away. It exploded as a supernova in 2017, and Hubble Space Telescope archival photos were used to locate the doomed progenitor star, as it looked in 2007. The star may have been as massive as 50 suns and burned at a furious rate, making it hotter and bluer than our Sun. It was so hot, it had lost its outer layers of hydrogen and helium. When it exploded in 2017, astronomers categorized it as a Type Ic supernova because of the lack of hydrogen and helium in the supernova's spectrum. In an alternative scenario (not shown here) a binary companion to the massive star may have stripped off its hydrogen and helium layers. Credits: NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted (STScI)

    This is an artist’s concept of a blue supergiant star that once existed inside a cluster of young stars in the spiral galaxy NGC 3938, located 65 million light-years away. It exploded as a supernova in 2017, and Hubble Space Telescope archival photos were used to locate the doomed progenitor star, as it looked in 2007. The star may have been as massive as 50 suns and burned at a furious rate, making it hotter and bluer than our Sun. It was so hot, it had lost its outer layers of hydrogen and helium. When it exploded in 2017, astronomers categorized it as a Type Ic supernova because of the lack of hydrogen and helium in the supernova’s spectrum. In an alternative scenario (not shown here) a binary companion to the massive star may have stripped off its hydrogen and helium layers.
    Credits: NA...

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    Trans-Galactic Streamers Feeding Most Luminous Galaxy in the Universe

    November 18, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist impression of W2246-0526, the most luminous known galaxy, and three companion galaxies. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello

    Artist impression of W2246-0526, the most luminous known galaxy, and three companion galaxies. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello

    ALMA data show the most luminous galaxy in the universe has been caught in the act of stripping away nearly half the mass from at least three of its smaller neighbors. The light from this galaxy, known as W2246-0526, took 12.4 billion years to reach us, so we are seeing it as it was when our universe was only about a tenth of its present age.

    New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveal distinct streamers of material being pulled from three smaller galaxies and flowing into the more massive galaxy, which was discovered in 2015 by NASA’s space-based Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)...

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    First-ever views of elusive Energy Explosion

    November 17, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist depiction of the MMS spacecraft that provided the first view of magnetic reconnection.
    Credit: NASA/GSFC

    Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have captured a difficult-to-view singular event involving “magnetic reconnection” – the process by which sparse particles and energy around Earth collide producing a quick but mighty explosion – in the Earth’s magnetotail, the magnetic environment that trails behind the planet.

    Magnetic reconnection has remained a bit of a mystery to scientists. They know it exists and have documented the effects that the energy explosions can have – sparking auroras and possibly wreaking havoc on power grids in the case of extremely large events – but they haven’t completely understood the details...

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